Witness to history: Dyker Thew's Lynn News article about the horrors of Belsen

Shortly after VE Day, Thew went to Germany for a tour of the British 2nd Army front, which included a visit to the notorious Belsen camp where more than 52,000 died during the Second World War.

This was not an extermination camp. It had no gas ovens. But conditions were such that death was inevitable. Most who died were Soviet prisoners-of-war but many others, such as Jews or gypsies, deemed as unfit to live in the Third Reich were also killed there, including the famous Amsterdam schoolgirl diarist Anne Frank.

Thew came to Bergen-Belsen shortly after the British had liberated it. What he found there formed the basis of a lengthy article which was featured in the newspaper on Friday, May 25, 1945.

Using his own (sometimes graphic) words, this is a summary of that report:

On a sunny spring morning I set out by staff car, and the Hanoverian countryside with its contrasting pine and birch trees, neat fields and red-tiled houses, made a pleasant prospect as we drove along to the small town of Bergen.

We drove through this peaceful-looking town and out along a rather dusty road into wooded countryside. It was somewhat reminiscent of Sandringham.

On one side were some handsome modern buildings were pointed out to me as having been a Panzer-Grenadier training school. There were also SS troop buildings on an even more elaborate scale.

In contrast, further down the road, was a vast enclosure of weather-beaten huts, partly hidden by a fringe of pine trees within rusty barbed-wire fencing. One saw many people moving about and British uniforms in evidence.

This was my introduction to Belsen concentration camp. Here, 60,000 people had been living in conditions of almost indescribable horror, under the Nazi regime, until their liberation by the British.

At the time of my visit the worst was over, thanks to the strenuous relief work of British troops. But there were still 15,000 people awaiting evacuation as fast as it could be managed. Meanwhile, they were being properly fed and were living in cleansed huts.

I met several soldiers, officers and men, all inspired in a terrible task by the humanity within their souls.

A raven-haired, attractive and smiling Jewess, who had been an inmate of the camp, was acting as an interpreter. She had recovered from the ordeal and remained to help, such was the bond of sympathy among those fellow-sufferers.

A number was branded on her forearm and, I was told, Belsen had been primarily a camp for women collected by the Nazis from all over occupied Europe, as well as Germany. The policy was to kill them by starvation, but things did not move as rapidly as was hoped, so other methods of extermination were added – brutal murder of every kind.

Then there were the poison-gas chambers, into which lines of people were marched; diabolical experiments were carried out by doctors of high standing in the German medical profession.

Much that I heard cannot be told in print – everyone who could speak a word of English wanted to tell their story and every story was one of terrible experiences.

When the British entered the camp the emaciated bodies of the starved dead were piled around – 17,000 skeletonised bodies had accumulated. And living skeletons were tottering about until they, too, laid their bodies with the lifeless.

The fury of our troops was aroused at what they found and SS men and women guards captured at the camp were made to work with bare hands and without respite collecting the bodies of the dead and burying them in mass graves. These SS men who had shown no pity to their prisoners were shown none by our troops and they were made to work at the graves until they collapsed in extremity.

The area of this “town” of huts was so vast that I drove around in a car and only saw part of it in an hour. The mass graves were being marked with notice boards and I stopped to read one: “Grave No 8. 1,000 bodies. April 30, 1945.”

Most of the women I saw in the camp had been fitted out with shoes and clothing requisitioned from German homes within a wide radius of the camp. There were a few men and women still in their prison stripes awaiting their turn for other clothes. To the end of my days I never want to see again black-and-white striped material, as it is indelibly associated in my mind with these unhappy people and this awful place.

The German guards had provided no proper water supply to the camp, so cleanliness had to be abandoned. There was no sanitary system, so a state of filth arose and the stench was still noticeable on my visit – but nothing as bad as it had been. Our soldiers had vomited as they tackled the task of clearing up.

Everywhere in the camp I saw grateful, thankful eyes following the British khaki uniforms. The pale, drawn faces could not show much expression, but the eyes that had seen so many horrors were eloquent in their depth of relief and gratitude.

Here in beautiful natural surroundings was Belsen – one of the blackest spots ever seen on earth and yet only one of the chain of extermination camps established by the controlling regime of the Greater German Reich.

I drove away from Belsen with harrowed feelings, and yet with a deep and burning anger against the Germans for perpetrating such outrages.

Not until after a bath in the German home where I was billeted did I feel outwardly cleansed. But the memory of Belsen can never be purged away from my mind.

Let us never forget that the extermination camp was part of the set-up of the German nation in its quest for world domination.

We must apply ourselves to the occupation of Germany until there is no possibility of these horrors being unleashed again. It will be a long task, for the Germans struck me as being an unregenerate nation.